After a year of analysis, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) concluded that the Department of Defense is still nowhere near developing a reliable defense against ballistic missiles.

 

About $80 billion was spent over the past 10 years building and testing various platforms for shooting down missiles. But the program continues to be plagued by all kind of problems, including repeated failures of interceptors, stated the GAO report.

 

Nonetheless, the Obama administration plans to sink more money into missile defense, approximately $44 billion over the next four years.

 

President Barack Obama remains committed to his goal of deploying interceptors in Europe by 2015.

 

According to the GAO, the Pentagon can’t even collect all of the necessary data to sufficiently assess the success of a missile test. Part of the problem stems from the difficulty of gathering information when interceptors must accurately strike an incoming warhead moving at speeds of up to 22,000 miles an hour

 

To date, the defense officials have collected only 15% “of the more than 2000 data points needed to create accurate models,” in the words of R. Jeffrey Smith of iWatch News, “and they don’t anticipate collecting the remainder for another five to ten years.”

-Noel Brinkerhoff

 

Missile Defenses Hobbled By Uncertainties (by R. Jeffrey Smith, iWatch News)

Opportunity Exists to Strengthen Acquisitions by Reducing Concurrency (Government Accountability Office) (pdf)